The obsession with giving people results directly in the search page was a huge mistake on their part. Content quality is just decreasing, people get wrong answers to questions they would have otherwise answered easily and accurately by reading an article on a website rather than a sentence taken out of context.

And for businesses to make it to the stupid Google box, they have to write articles formatted not for human eyes or cognition, but for SEO.

Thus Google is one of the main drives of quality decreasing online. Their unhealthy practices forces everyone to write dumb shit (like those Q&A or click bait articles) in order to have some kind of platform or presence.